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Session 25: Interfaces: Print, Visual Media, and Knowledge Production in Southeast Asia
Organizer: Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
Chair: Jennifer Foley, Cornell University
Discussant: Andrew Goss, University of New Orleans
Keywords: Southeast Asian, material culture, semiotics.
Interfaces are surfaces that establish physical boundaries. The same term also describes a zone of commonality, such as the theories, practices, and problems shared by two or more disciplines or fields of study. In yet other instances, interfaces enable communication across independent and unrelated systems. All three of these meanings (separate, shared, and permeable) are in play and thematically unite this panel; collectively, the papers explore interfaces where print encounters other forms of representation. Foley describes the emergence of French colonial travel guides to Angkor, which attempted to weave Khmer "culture," "art," and "history" into coherent and utilitarian texts. MacLean examines controversial border agreements between Vietnam and China and how different actors inside and outside Vietnam have used the same materials to advance quite different arguments concerning their moral and political legitimacy. Rath illustrates how Indonesian artists and critics have selectively appropriated concepts drawn from international currents in postmodernism to fashion debates about Indonesia’s place in the world. Stein turns critical attention to the complex role that chalkboards play in framing discussions of public health and social deviance in a village in central Java. Under what circumstances do these hybrid entities (pictorial guides, maps, art catalogues, and statistical charts) acquire social lives and agency? How do these interfaces shape knowledge production in the specific historical and cultural context in which the entities are embedded? In what ways does the organizing metaphor of "interfaces" enable critical comparisons across geographic, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries?
The War of the Maps: Contesting Borders and Political Legitimacy in Late-Socialist Vietnam
Ken MacLean, University of Michigan
After eighteen rounds of talks that first began thirty years ago, the governments of Vietnam and China signed several border agreements in 1999 and 2000. The terms of these agreements, which were not made public in Vietnam until 2002, marked the normalization of official ties between the two countries after more than a decade of tension caused by a border war in 1979. In recent years, at least three Vietnamese "dissidents" have been jailed for circulating writings critical of the agreements, which they separately assert conceded valuable territory to China without public consultation. Dozens more, including senior Communist Party members in Vietnam, have been detained or placed under surveillance by security forces for publishing "open letters" that raised similar questions about the agreements. This paper examines the politically and culturally charged debate amongst members of the Vietnamese community, including those living abroad. Specifically, the paper describes how actors participating in the debate have marshaled different kinds of textual and visual evidence (field research, colonial-era border agreements and maps, as well as official documents and commentaries drawn from the present) to critique and to defend the new boundaries. I argue that the maps not only index the territorial limits of nation-states, but they also help organize social identities and relations among them via the ownership of things. In this debate, arguments turn on who "owns" sovereignty? Different maps thus serve as an alternate means to mark not just national boundaries but where political legitimacy begins and ends in late-socialist Vietnam.
Lost in the Jungle: Culture, Art, and Colonial Guidebooks to Angkor
Jennifer Foley, Cornell University
Each year, millions of guidebooks are purchased by travelers who scour them in search of the best restaurant in town, the ideal place to buy souvenirs, and to learn something about the history and culture of their destination. With the need for a compressed format to facilitate travel, and the tendency towards immediate obsolescence, this medium, which conveys ‘culture,’ ‘art,’ and ‘history’ to enormous numbers of people each year, is perhaps bound to fail in its mission: the provision of accurate information. It is a shortcoming that has been the focus of complaints since the medium’s inception. This paper will investigate the intersection of the needs and restrictions of the medium, the pressures and persuasions of the writers’ cultural context and that of the audience, and the swift slide into the passé of the cultural guidebook. The focus of this investigation will be the colonial-era guidebooks of Angkor, each written in turn by the chief conservator of the monuments, between the retrocession of the temples to French colonial Cambodia in 1907, and the close of the colonial era in Indochina. Utilizing the guidebook as an interface of exploration, this discussion will delve into the ways in which these guidebooks, marketed as the words of the foremost experts, perpetuated outmoded and simplistic descriptions of the temples, and at times contradicted their own scholarly work. Finally, this paper will examine the way in which these guidebooks encouraged the exotic and fantastical encounters with the temples that came to be de riguer.
Playing the "Game Effect": Pascamodernisme and the Postmodern in an Indonesian Art Discourse
Amanda Guimeraiz-Rath, Cornell University
Beginning in the early 1990’s, universities, art exhibitions, and other venues became sites where Indonesians publicly sought to make sense of post-modernism, a loose collection of often disparate concepts and practices that emerged a decade earlier in "the West." Indonesian intellectuals and artists were primarily attracted to those strands of postmodernism concerning the possibilities of radical cultural resistance and the power of representation to recast local traditions and forms of identity denied by national ones. But rather than localizing postmodern ideas, i.e., render them meaningful in idiomatic terms, some Indonesian scholars "inserted" Indonesian contemporary art developments directly into the history of postmodernism itself. Ironically, this strategy which invoked a "universal" postmodern reproduced some of modernism’s structures of universalism that some Indonesian intellectuals set out to critique. This paper focuses on the influential Jakarta Biennale IX (1993) that, as an exhibition, functioned as an interface where art objects and the various discourses that surround them meet. More specifically, the paper examines efforts by some intellectuals to reconcile contemporary forms of Indonesian art and cultural production with broader trends shaping the discourse of postmodern art internationally. Materials from the exhibition (its organizing theme, artworks, and the catalogue text describing both) are utilized to illustrate how and why there was a fierce debate over whether Indonesian art was postmodern or not. The provisional outcome of this debate reveals how Indonesian intellectuals, artists, critics, and curators variously understand postmodernism and postmodern theory. Their viewpoints, in turn, have important implications for a global art history.
The Politics of Small Numbers in Java
Eric A. Stein, University of Michigan
Throughout Java, village halls are lined with columns of development statistics recorded on immense chalkboards, filling visual space with grids of data that spill out into the everyday. The bureaucratic pressures on village officials to record statistics on the minutiae of life (the number of goats, bicycles, peanut fields, pregnant women, toilets, houses with dirt floors, Christians, IUD acceptors, and suspected communists) inspired a local industry for estimating, fabricating, and recycling data to conform with sub-district norms and quotas. Under these conditions, the numerical signifiers in statistical charts float away from their material signifiers, confounding the ability of statistical surveillance to effectively track "deviant" populations for later development interventions. In this paper, I argue that, despite the inaccuracy of numbers, it is the act of counting and the visual display of statistics in the village halls that establishes development as a normalizing presence. While the numerical content of the charts may be fabricated, ignored, or outdated, the form of the data boards, the columns into which data flows, map onto, and generate, a vocabulary of development that resonates in neighborhood meetings and household discussions. By examining the chalkboards in Java as an interface of numbers on physical charts, I highlight how the material, in some circumstances, overshadows the text itself, becoming the primary sign that is read by village publics.